1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a stock management system and, in particular, to a system that uses a graphic interface to perform stock management.
2. Related Art
In conventional production-distribution systems, stock performs the roles of “storage” and “maintenance”. However, under the pressures of new consumer demands, huge amounts of complicated data, and competitive markets, goods must enter and leave a stock system in a rapid and complicated manner so as to achieve proper timing and satisfy the market's requirements of quantity and variety. Therefore, a dynamic management function for stock systems has become more important than the simple maintenance function in conventional stock. The dynamic management function combines the conventional stock system and the currently popular data warehouse system. The purpose of such a combination is to plan and manage storage space so as to effectively control the sources, destinations and fluctuations of goods.
Along with the changes in the consumer market, the industry faces a competitive environment with rapid changes, low inventory (null inventory), fast responses, and high customer satisfaction guarantee requirements. A complete supply chain system is a key factor for a company's success. In particular, the designs of the stock and distribution network systems determine the operational efficiency of the whole supply chain system.
In the prior art, the applications of data warehousing focus on providing accurate and integrated data to the marketing, financial, stocking, manufacturing, and other units in the enterprise that are in need of information to make decisions. Information established by each operating unit in the enterprise can provide a knowledge database for employees to search. This is particularly useful in providing integrated observations of the enterprise such as integrated sales, manufacturing and inventory data.
However, conventional data warehousing systems have a data updating cycle of one month or one week, and data searches and modifications are usually initiated within a group-oriented environment (sometimes completed by manual operations). These processes often take quite a long time. Thus, typical applications can be processed in real time during the daytime. Such batch tasks as client classification, inventory management, distribution flows, profit computations, and predictive model estimations and analyses cannot be fed back into the operating system within a short period of time to serve as references for better decisions.
Accordingly, applications of data warehousing will greatly enlarge the scope of the technology in the field. Event estimations for online users should be done quickly and a minimal response time is required. Such requirements must be implemented in the conventional decision-supported large database and should apply to complicated searches. In addition, data access has to be closer to a real-time response than conventional data warehousing.
Nowadays, many stock management systems do not have a sufficient number of functions. Without a client operating interface, the following situations occur: (a) the client rents space from a host stock and directly operates using the client's stock management system; (b) the client does not use its own stock management system and the host enters data for the client; and (c) stock operation information is entered repeatedly (in both the client and the host systems). This is all because the production distribution information cannot be transmitted or shared, causing a cycle of bad production distribution quality.
In current production distribution systems or warehouse management systems, table views or table browsers are widely used to organize and manipulate data. Although table views are detailed and well organized, the data presentation is not intuitive and the data are difficult to manipulate. To obtain useful information one usually needs to go through complicated searches or inspection. Even if auxiliary means such as circle graphs, curve graphs, or rectangular graphs are employed, the user can only roughly understand the situation without being able to complete meaningful operations.
In view of the foregoing, an intuitive, simple and graphic operation management interface is an urgent need in stock management systems.